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About Michael J. Miller

Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PC Magazine to share his thoughts on PC-related products. No investment advice is offered in this blog. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

Sun: The End of an Era

I know a lot of people last week who were disheartened when they typed www.sun.com into their browsers and wound up on Oracle's home page. It wasn't really a surprise--Oracle's acquisition of Sun has been underway for months--but it did mark the end of an era.

Sun, which was founded in 1982 by Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, Andreas Bechtolsheim, and Vinod Khosla, was long a leader in technical computing. It was never part of the traditional "PC Market," but its software and servers played crucial roles in the development of the Internet. For PC users, most of the attention went to Java, the hardware-independent language and development platform created by James Gosling and a team of engineers who were originally working on a product to connect various household appliances. By 1995, it had been renamed Java, and pretty much defined the way that Web servers were written in the early Internet boom. We gave the product an award for technical excellence in 1995, Gosling and the team were named our "persons of the year" in 1997, and we gave a lifetime achievement award to Sun co-founder Bill Joy in 1999.

Java is still one of the key technologies that make the Web work, And it's part of many of the big Web server software packages to this day, including products from Sun and Oracle, as well as IBM. Java remains a presence on a number of Web sites, especially in the mobile world.

Sun, of course, also made many of the servers that powered the Internet boom, with much of the attention going to machines built on its Sparc processor designs. This, too, continues to this day, though Sparc machines have lost market share to arrays of x86-based machines. Still, it's a unique and very powerful architecture, and Oracle has promised to keep working on it as well. Indeed, the company is now promising to spend more on Sparc than Sun has been.

In general, Oracle is talking up the combination of Sun hardware and its Oracle database as part of its Exadata line, and positioning the combination as the fastest database solution.

In recent years, Sun also acquired OpenOffice and MySQL, open-source alternatives to Microsoft Office and to relational databases; and Sun has been a vocal proponent of open source for many years. These products have millions of fans, and Oracle has promised to continue development of both of these.

And of course, Sun long pushed Solaris, its version of the Unix OS, and Sun can rightly be credited for much of the success and attention that Unix has received over the years.

I'd also like to mention a part of Sun that hasn't gotten much attention in recent years: workstations. (For a long time, the company's ticker symbol was SUNW, a reference to the workstations, although in recent years, it changed to JAVA.) In the 80's, Sun workstations were in many ways the foundation of a whole lot of the science and engineering done at that time. For many years, workstations were "serious machines," while PCs were seen by many as relative toys. Again, the x86 workstation market has largely eclipsed Unix workstations, but many of the high-end applications run on PCs today started life on such machines.

The last few years were not Sun's strongest, and the company finally sold to Oracle last year, with the deal closing last week following EU approval. But throughout its history, Sun had a deserved reputation for R&D and innovation.

Scott McNealy, co-founder and long-time chairman of the company, issued a memo to employees commemorating the Oracle acquisition, in which he displayed his characteristic openness and combativeness.

"To be honest, this is a not a note this founder wants to write," he said. "Sun, in my mind, should have been the great and surviving consolidator. But I love the market economy and capitalism more than I love my company." The full note is on CNET, and here is an interview I did with him in 2001.

Sun's technologies will live on as part of Oracle, and the company has ambitious plans for combining the two. But still, in a large way, its closing as a separate entity marks the end of an era in the Valley.

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